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National Freeloader League

That doesn’t mean you have to ban youth football. But you might want to hold some hearings and take a good, hard look at what can be done to make it safer. At the very least, you probably ought to review the NFL’s youth football brain safety initiatives, given the league’s: (a) bottom-line desire to turn today’s Pee Wee players into tomorrow’s paying customers; (b) less-than-sterling track record of protecting adult players’ brains.

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Five years ago, you called out the NFL for its appalling pattern of brain injury denial, of producing bogus science and subjecting players to unnecessary risk. You shamed the league into making changes: some of them cosmetic, sure, but some of them meaningful. When Rep. Linda Sanchez likened the NFL’s behavior to Big Tobacco—a lawyer-run racket putting liability evasion above public safety—she was on the mark. (You’ve heard ofLeague of Denial, right?)

Thing is, you’ve stopped applying oversight, and without that pressure, the league continues to spin and equivocate. The same Guadalajara medical school-trained rheumatologist who headed the NFL’s discredited concussion committee remains a league medical advisor. Last year, Goodell declined to acknowledge a link between football and brain damage. (Indeed, the NFL has admitted the existence of said link exactly once). And while the commissioner and other league surrogates are busy emphasizing the need for more data before drawing any conclusions, the NFL’s youth arm, USA Football, is pushing a safety program called “Heads Up”—which purports to teach safer tackling techniques, even though no data indicates that Heads Up makes football safer.

Speaking of brain damage, don’t forget the pending NFL concussion lawsuit settlement. For $765 million—plus another $112 million in lawyer payouts, a total sum that’s still less than the league earns selling the rights to a single season of “Monday Night Football”—the NFL gets to walk away from both thousands of brain-damaged retirees and its own questionable behavior without admitting fault. Nor does the league have to reveal what it knew about concussions and when it knew it—information that could help the public at large quantify football’s risks, and perhaps evaluate whether the NFL should be trusted going forward.

Wondering who pays for battered brains and broken bodies when the league doesn’t? We do—and will—via Medicare and higher private insurance premiums. “When these players retire and have dementia and burn through their savings for care—and when the NFL has not done right by them—ultimately they end up with the taxpayers paying for it,” says the honorable Representative Sanchez. “And that is a huge hit to our safety net.” To borrow a popular political meme: Thanks, Goodellcare!

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By now, one thing should be clear: The NFL is not a private business. Not really. Much like Wall Street’s investment banks, it’s a quasi-public organizationthat games the system by privatizing profit and socializing risk. A semi-ward of the state.

And what other semi-public organization could get away with referring to African-Americans as “Darkskins,” or Asian-Americans as “Yellowskins?” The Washington Redskins are basically doing the same thing. And you’re doing zilch about it, even as you subsidize the team and its parent league. Actually, that’s not entirely fair: Ten members of the Congressional Native American Caucus have urged Goodell and Snyder to change the team’s name. In response, Goodell wrote a letter touting the NFL’s commitment to “diversity and inclusion,” while Snyder told USA Today that he would “never” change the name, and “you can put that in capital letters.” N-E-V-E-R.